Chapter 28
It was dark when Vivi found her way to her uncle’s house. Later, she would say that she didn’t know how she made it. A force
outside her own had been leading her through the woods, where she’d wobbled through the thicket, scraping her arms against
bark and stones as she stumbled. She was bleeding and bruised, dazed by her surroundings. But somehow, she managed to find
the rented motorbike and retrace the path back into town, swaying the entire way. Her survival instinct thrashed its way through
the surface of her delirium.
On the road, the trees seemed to lean toward her with malice. Leaves gossiping in rustles of sound that were louder than they
had any right to be. A civet darted across the road, then turned golden eyes onto hers, its hackles rising in menace. She
sped past it, knowing that if she stopped, she might not leave the spot where she fell.
At last, when Vivi arrived at the Long Xuyên house, she nearly collapsed on the doorstep. Linh, gasping at the sight of her cuts, her unfocused gaze and erratic breath,
brought Vivi to bed. Someone drew off her mud-crusted sneakers. A hand skated across her forehead.
Linh’s skin was so cold on hers that Vivi shivered. Her temperature had gone far beyond the threshold of comfort. She was
in a fever, the worst she’d ever experienced. Even her teeth felt like molten beads searing the tissue of her mouth.
Sometime later, through wavering eyelids, she saw a doctor approach the bed.
An anise-scented liquid stuck on its way down her throat.
He forced a pill between her lips. She tried to bite his fingers and he drew back with a sharp curse.
?? má, same across all languages. Voices clanged softly together like shaken beads.
When Vivi closed her eyes, beasts ranged across her imagination. Snakes with the heads of tigers. Deer with humpbacks. They
clawed at her, as if she were hiding something they needed to find. Blood surged in her ears, but her body was still as a
tomb, her lips mute as midnight. She couldn’t fight any of the threats, from within or without.
Hours, maybe more, passed in this confusion. She did not think she could take another minute. But when she woke, it was evening,
and she didn’t feel as if she were burning anymore, only deeply sore and parched. Someone was sitting next to her—a warm,
solid presence that lifted a glass of water to her lips.
“Button?” she asked, trying to blink past the layers of sleep.
Ki`êu’s face settled into clarity. Concern in his eyes; a creased brow that, for a moment, reminded her of her father rifling for
the disability checks in the mail. “Your sister and Linh are fetching more medicine for you. Calla didn’t want you to wake
alone.”
“How long—”
“Almost two days. But the fever’s passed.”
Two days lost. There was little chance of recovering the offering and returning to Chicago before the opening of Sea to Earth, especially when her search had yielded nothing at all. She’d looked everywhere at the Old House. If the offering was still
there, it was evading her.
She mustered the manners to say, “I can’t thank you all enough. Especially after you warned me not to go alone.”
“There’s no blame between family,” he said. Vivi gave him an odd look; to her, there was only blame between family. “Your sister is distraught, you know.”
“I didn’t mean to worry anyone.”
“She said you’ve been looking for something at the house by the ravine. Did you find it?”
“No.”
“Maybe I can help. With you and your sister nearby, I find it easier to return to my childhood. It’s as if my brother is here,
calling for me to join him.”
Vivi jostled herself into a sitting position. “Anything you can share would be helpful. I’d like to understand more about
Tam. What she was like in her final days.”
“It was a lifetime ago. Before my time.” He sat in thought for a few moments. “But Tam, Madame Ly as we called her then, made an impression on us all. My parents talked about her even after she died. Not just because she’d
bought the old family home. But because she was such a novelty. The neighbors simply referred to her as the Foreigner.”
“How did she come to know your family?”
“She’d hired Ng?c as a sort of nurse, and sometimes my grandmother took Tu?n with her. He was little more than a toddler when Madame Ly arrived. She indulged him. I doubt he remembered anything about her either, he was so young.”
“And her relationship with Huy?”
“She took a special liking to my father. One understands why now. He was a musician—a flutist—and sometimes he’d come to her
house and play the old songs for her.”
“They were friends?”
“I don’t know that they saw each other as often as Ng?c saw Madame Ly. But yes, they seemed to have some kind of kinship, from what my grandmother said. It’s a marvel to think of it now. Mother
and son, reunited after so many years. I wonder if she, Madame Ly, told him who she was.”
“I don’t know. I hope she did. He was her reason for returning to Viet Nam. Did anyone in the family ever mention hearing about a sundial?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“A place where time peels from light?”
“That doesn’t strike anything for me either. I know you hoped for something more, but these are only borrowed memories, after
all.”
“I understand.”
He offered an affectionate smile. “Sometimes we have to accept that there will be blank spaces that we may never resolve.
I’ve studied our family’s lineage for most of my adult life, and still I can’t peer into the past with the clarity I might
wish. After all, I hadn’t imagined that Tam had returned to us—that she was still alive—until you told me.”
“Doesn’t it frustrate you, knowing so little?”
“At my age, I’ve come to see that not knowing is a gift too. Sometimes, it’s the most merciful one we can give to ourselves
and others.”
He was right: Vivi might never know whether Tam ever revealed herself to Huy or whether Ng?c resented her sister’s return, after her years of disappearance.
Would Ng?c have recognized her sister immediately?
And did she hold blame toward Tam for leaving Huy in her care?
Or did they simply pretend not to know each other, to start fresh with an illusion of ignorance?
Who was Vivi to disturb the past? What did any of them owe her; what did she owe them? An abandoned house might never reveal
a single answer. A lost painting might never shed light on a broken heart. All you could do was hold the questions for as
long as you could bear, before dropping them in the river of time.
Calla and Linh returned, relieving Ki`êu from bedside duties, even as Vivi insisted she didn’t need nursing. No one listened to her. They brought bowls of broth and
rearranged her blankets as if she were a dumpling to be molded for the steamer.
As Calla draped a washcloth over Vivi’s forehead, she hummed the tune of a Velvet Underground song they’d both loved when they were teenagers.
Vivi glimpsed Calla as she once was, bent over a sketchbook in their childhood room, her back curved like a fishhook, Stygian shadows brushing against her forearms.
After a moment, Vivi added her voice to Calla’s humming, resurfacing the lyrics from their past with a catch in her throat.
Pure worlds, strange mirrors, and lingering eyes, images as haunting now as they were then. Calla paused, then began to sing
too, layering her clear soprano atop Vivi’s wavering alto in such precise harmony that it became difficult to distinguish
whose voice was whose.
Linh listened from the doorway, smiling when they halted, swallowing all the things they couldn’t say. “Pretty singers. Pretty
sisters.”
That night, Calla slept on a floor mat by Vivi’s feet. To give her space, she said. The truth was, neither of them could bear
the lie of physical closeness at that moment. Not after what they’d said to each other. It felt as if a weary old bridge had
finally crumbled, leaving an unfilled gap that neither could cross.
Rain pattered on the roof and pushed a cool wind onto Vivi’s skin, soothing the last of the flush from her fever. She watched
her sister breathing in and out, a small furrow in her brow, and had the sensation of missing Calla deeply, desperately. She’d
spent so long grieving their lost intimacy. Without honesty between them—an honesty that’d been tainted long ago, perhaps
even before they were born—they would always stand apart. Reaching for each other maybe, but ultimately divided. Now, at the
end of the seeking, Vivi found she could no longer countenance that distance.
“Bee?” Calla’s voice came from the bottom of the bed. “Are you crying?”
“No.”
Calla crept up onto the bed and used a corner of the bedsheet to wipe her sister’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know what all this was for.”
“Searching for the offering?”
“Waiting for Mom to come back.” It surprised her, this truth.
“I’ve been ready to stop playing protector for years now.
In some part of my mind, I thought if she would return to us, then I could hand it back to her, that role that was thrust on me.
But she’s dead and so it’s just me and no one is coming to relieve me and I’m afraid I’ll never get what I want. ”
“What do you want?”
“Besides a pair of functional, living parents?”
“Might as well ask for the moon.”
“I want to move in with Samuel. I want to let myself love Phoebe.” She answered without hesitation. “To continue my work and
make mistakes without them costing me everything. Mostly I want to stop worrying about whether you’ll start taking pills again
or run through your savings or get stranded in some Latvian forest.”
“I’ve never thought about Latvia in my life.” Calla wrinkled her nose, then grinned. “But I’m intrigued.”
“You know what I mean. I want to be your sister, not your surrogate mother.”
“So just be my sister.”
“It’s that easy?”
“It can be.” Calla’s answer was meant to be reassuring, but instead, it sounded sad and final, like the closing strains of
a song you might never hear again.